Disease Hysteria: a Precursor to Violence and Genocide (remember the Nazis?)

by Stephen Halbrook

“Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as major spreaders of the disease as a way of garnering public support for imprisoning them in ghettos.” — Alice Klein, NewScientist (July 24, 2020)

Well, here we (predictably) go. The Corona Fascists are projecting their genocidal actions onto those of us who refuse to commit suicide with the COVID shot. While the vaccinated are the true spreaders, we are supposedly the spreaders — and are a threat to all of society.

Just see what they are saying.

First, we are the pandemic.

“The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated …” — Fake President Joe Biden

“This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” — CDC Director Rochelle Walensky

And so on and so on.

We are as reckless as drunk drivers:

It’s a choice to live with this virus, and with all due respect, you don’t have the choice to go out and drink and drive and put everybody else’s lives at risk. That’s the equivalent of this moment with the deadliness and efficiency of the Delta virus. You’re putting other people’s, innocent people’s lives at risk. — California Governor Gavin Newsom

Because, as Globalist Fuhrer himself Klaus Schwab says,

As long as not everybody is vaccinated, nobody will be safe.

How to deal with us? CNN propagandist Don Lemon suggests a policy that results in homelessness and starvation:

Don’t get the vaccine? You can’t go to the supermarket. Don’t have the vaccine? Can’t go to the ball game. Don’t have the vaccine? Can’t go to work. You don’t have a vaccine? Can’t come here, no shirt, no shoes, no service.

Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte has a solution: confine us to our homes, “because you are a walking spreader.” He adds:

Those who don’t want [the vaccine], for all I care, you can die anytime.

Perhaps they are in a race to get us before Nuremberg 2.0 — which probably terrifies them.

In any case, history repeats. If history is any indication, all of this inflammatory rhetoric can end badly. Namely, genocide: take the death shot or die.

Disease hysteria as a precursor to violence and genocide in history

Historically, disease hysteria has been a precursor to violence and genocide. Ignorance, fear, and wickedness are a powerful combination.

Indeed, many are so paralyzed by such hysteria that they are subject to irrational and horrifically evil behavior in the name of preventing it. 

For instance, in 1321 in France, lepers were “killed in riots or burned at the stake without trial” for allegedly plotting to spread disease.[1] Jews “incriminated in a poorly defined causal pathway of contagion and thousands were executed in organized efforts in various places and times to control plague, particularly in the 14th century.”[2] In Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, wandering gypsies were killed for, among other things, allegedly being disease carriers.[3]

Persecuting regimes or societies may equate the objects of persecution with diseases — making it easier to murder them. Gregory H. Stanton, President of Genocide Watch, writes:

One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.[4] 

In Latin America, an Indian group called the Ache, hunted by the Paraguayans, were considered “‘rabid rats’; and rabid rats must be exterminated.”[5]

The medical profession and disease hysteria

The medical profession has had its share in atrocities in the name of combating disease — whether literally, or figuratively seeing their victims as such. It is justified on the basis of the “greater good”; harming the patient is considered necessary in order to heal the nation. Prior to his suicide,[6] Dr. Mehmed Resid, complicit in the 1915 Armenian genocide and known as the “butcher of Diyarbakir”, wrote:

Even though I am a physician, I cannot ignore my nationhood. Armenian traitors … were dangerous microbes. Isn’t it the duty of a doctor to destroy these microbes? My Turkishness prevailed over my medical calling. Of course my conscience is bothering me, but I couldn’t see my country disappearing. As to historical responsibility, I couldn’t care less what historians of other nations write about me.[7]

Robert M. Kaplan comments:

Resid’s statement is a crucial example of doctors who see their historic obligation to care for their patients as secondary to their responsibility to the state, where they turn their skills at saving lives into mass murder. Whether they knew of Resid or not, this was the same defence used by the German doctors in the Nuremberg medical trials.[8]

Thus, in Germany, “many medical professionals … began identifying Jews as carriers of disease and in fact as disease themselves.”[9] And so,

Medical metaphor blended with concrete biomedical ideology in the Nazi sequence from coercive sterilization to direct medical killing to the death camps. The unifying principle of the biomedical ideology was that of a deadly racial disease, the sickness of the Aryan race; the cure, the killing of all Jews.[10] 

Regarding the prevention of literal disease, Nazi doctors in Auschwitz “conducted a murderous epidemiology, sending to the gas chamber groups of people with contagious diseases and sometimes including everyone else who might be on the medical block.”[11] 

Dangerous hysteria against “Anti-Vaxxers”

If human nature and history teach us anything, the escalating slanderous verbal attacks against those who oppose vaccines could fuel violence and murder. Considering how fast things are escalating, I’d be surprised if it doesn’t.

With so much rage instilled by pro-vaccine propaganda by the medical profession, the media, and others, it may not take much for those who do not vaccinate to become the objects of violent persecution. How easy it might be for those in a city or town to become triggered by manipulated “case numbers” and inflict violence on the non-vaccinated.

Alex Alvarez writes that the Nazis fostered conditions to portray Jews as natural disease carriers to justify their genocidal actions:

Under the Nazis, this supposed connection between Jews and disease created the ideal situation for a self-fulfilling prophecy. The segregation of the Jews from the general population could be justified on the grounds of preventing the transmission of disease and once they had been crowded into ghettos and deprived of enough food and sanitation facilities, the outbreak of disease in these places was inevitable. The Nazis, however, attributed it to the Jewish propensity to carry disease, not the conditions in the ghetto. In short, the Nazis were able to portray their discriminatory and genocidal actions as necessary to maintain the health and welfare of German society.[12] 

One can see potential parallels between this and the mindset of those who are militantly pro-vaccine. Jews were demonized for spreading disease, even though bad living conditions and sanitation were the main reason for outbreaks. Those who oppose vaccines are demonized for spreading — or at least potentially spreading — disease.

(However, it was improvements in living conditions and sanitation that actually resulted in the decline of disease in the West, although vaccines erroneously have taken the credit and considered necessary for disease prevention.) 

Murder “for the greater good”

The Nazis also justified murder “as necessary to maintain the health and welfare of German society” — in short, “for the greater good.” This utilitarian philosophy is the very basis for the insistence that everyone must be vaccinated, for such a philosophy maintains that, for the greater good, vaccine-related deaths are acceptable. Once this philosophy is assumed instead of God’s law, then anything can be justified; including persecuting and murdering those who supposedly undermine the greater good by refusing vaccination. 

Regarding misrepresenting vaccine opponents as promoting disease, we concur with Susan Sontag, “[T]o describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence.”[13] Regarding the state’s unwarranted promotion of vaccines in the name of eradicating disease, we concur with Robert Jay Lifton, who writes:

If you are curing a sickness, anything is permissible. That image of cure lends itself to the restorative myth of state violence and to the literal enactment of the myth. Attitudes associated with modern nationalism — the healing of the wounds of one’s own extended biological group or family — can readily move the myth into the territory of genocide.[14]

This scenario only seems inconceivable when we forget that human nature hasn’t changed since Nazi Germany.

We may find ourselves faced with either violence and death as a result of vaccination, or violence or death for refusing vaccination.

Pray that the Lord Jesus Christ delivers us from such a nightmarish scenario.

The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. (Psalm 18:2)

Jordan Peterson on disease obsession, Nazis and totalitarianism

Notes
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[1] Timothy S. Miller and John W. Nesbitt, Walking Corpses: Leprosy in Byzantium and the Medieval West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 97.
[2] Raj S. Bhopal, Migration, Ethnicity, Race, and Health in Multicultural Societies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), 96.
[3] Christopher R. Browning, “The Nazi Empire,” in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (NY: Oxford University Press, 2010) (no page number given – part of Google Books preview). Retrieved July 21, 2015, from https://books.google.com/books?id=xCHMFHQRNtYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false.
[4] Gregory H. Stanton, “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” Genocide Watch. Retrieved July 20, 2015, from http://genocidewatch.org/genocide/tenstagesofgenocide.html.
[5] Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986), 489. Citation from Eric Wolf, quoted in Kuper, Genocide, 40.
[6] Robert M. Kaplan, Medical Murder: Disturbing Cases of Doctors Who Kill (Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2009), 187.
[7] Cited in Ibid., 188.
[8] Robert M. Kaplan, “Monstrous Complicity: Doctors and the Armenian Genocide,” ABC (April 21, 2015). Retrieved July 20, 2015, from http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/04/21/4220896.htm. 
[9] Alex Alvarez, Genocidal Crimes (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 52.
[10] Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986), 16.
[11] Ibid., 18.
[12] Alvarez, Genocidal Crimes, 53. Guenter Lewy writes, 

Jews, Gypsies and other “alien races” were seen as natural carriers of lethal parasites such as lice, and the resort to draconian measures for ending epidemics among them was almost standard operating procedure. “The Nazi methods of ‘fighting’ infectious diseases,” writes Isaiah Trunk, “were well known and were feared not less than the epidemics themselves.”

Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 114.
[13] Susan Sontag, “Disease as Political Metaphor,” New York Review of Books (Feb. 23, 1978), 29-35. Cited in Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 488.
[14] Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, 488.

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